The answer is 42. Now what's the question?<br><br>One of the more enterta...

Julian Bond - 2013-09-09 09:15:29+0000 - Updated: 2013-09-09 09:15:29+0000

The answer is 42. Now what's the question?

One of the more entertaining comments about all the NSA, GCHQ, Snowden, Greenwald, Schneier revelations.

So all the information in the entire electronic communications system of the world is now being bugged and searched. We have what is by orders of magnitude the largest data bank ever conceived, giving us Laplacian knowledge about our society at every point in time. I've occasionally speculated on the kind of data cornucopia we could have if we weren't obsessed with privacy - and now we've got it.

And what are we doing with it? If you believe the government, they're looking for terrorists; if you listen to just-proven-correct paranoiacs, they're looking for opposition; in any case, how terribly trivial.

We have a corpus that contains the answers to almost any question about human beings. We have the oracle in front of us. And all we can ask it is "Who is going to plant a bomb where?"

...

why isn't there an industry for thinking up questions?

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/09/the-latest-news.html#comment-1665702

The latest news - Charlie's Diary

Edward Morbius - 2013-09-09 11:16:49+0000

"Privacy's dead, and we're not getting anything worthwhile out of it."

I'm launching the hashtag: #stupendouslybigdataopportunities

If you were made Lord God Emperor Of PRISM, what wisdom would you extract from this trove?

Julian Bond - 2013-09-09 11:35:49+0000

This should be taken as ironic sarcasm not a real suggestion. What if the NSA's treasure trove (NSA as Smaug!) were handed over to Google for indexing and searchability. Using Google Maps style automated redaction and anonymisation to protect the innocent, but with Google analytics and trends to help the data mining. And an API into the dataset so we could all play as well.

Edward Morbius - 2013-09-09 12:05:39+0000

+Julian Bond Oh, that was meant ironically? ;-)

I know. But ... still. The point is well-made that this is a mind-boggling data trove. And the best we can do is look for bogeymen and attempt to snuff out political foes?

Julian Bond - 2013-09-09 13:41:42+0000

We could even help the CIA-NSA do their jobs and find terrorists. Because obviously when the Reddit experience went wrong after Boston it was due to insufficient data.

Edward Morbius - 2013-09-09 14:31:47+0000

+Julian Bond I'd seen suggestions long before Boston (dating to 9/11) of the TLAs posting data publicly to get analysis. Needn't necessarily be unobfuscated or even legitimate -- people like to bake things over.

And yes, the Reddit Boston episode suggests that Big Data + Hivemind does not of and by itself guarantee correct results, though on balance I'd say the Reddit crowd did pretty well.